Patricia Cleary Miller is amused and amazed by the strange people she sees in her placid town, but she dares not write about them--you might recognize them. Patricia taught literature and writing at Rockhurst University, and now she is helping to raise money for students majoring in the Humanities. Her poems and biographical musings have appeared in many journals, including New Letters, The Same, I-70 Review, Helicon Nine, and Connecticut Review. Her poetry collection, Starting a Swan Dive, published by BKMK Press, won the Daniel S. Brenner Award for Scholarly Achievement. Her book Crimson Lights collected the poems she wrote as poet laureate of the Harvard Alumni Association 2004-2012.
Jack Smith has published three novels: Being (2016), Icon (2014), and Hog to Hog, which won the 2007 George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2008. He has published stories in a number of literary magazines, including Southern Review, North American Review, Texas Review, Xconnect, In Posse Review, and Night Train. His reviews have appeared widely in such publications as Ploughshares, Georgia Review, American Book Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, the Missouri Review, Xconnect, and Environment magazine. He has published a few dozen articles in both Novel & Short Story Writer's Market and The Writer magazine. His creative writing book, Write and Revise for Publication: A 6-Month Plan for Crafting an Exceptional Novel and Other Works of Fiction, was published in 2013 by Writer's Digest Books. His coauthored nonfiction environmental book entitled Killing Me Softly was published by Monthly Review Press in 2002. Besides his writing, Smith was fiction editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern, an online literary magazine published by Truman State University, for 25 years. He has taught philosophy and ethics for 20 years at North Central Missouri College.
This event features music by Gib Shell.